Book Review: A SEASON OF FIRE by Douglas Gantenbein, Tarcher/Putnam, $24.95, 292 pages

...Today, fire experts are questioning the notion that there might be a 'normal' fire year," Douglas Gantenbein writes in "A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines of America's Forests." "Yet we have only a limited understanding of what actually constitutes a 'natural' forest, with its interplay of growth, fire, and destruction, an interplay that despite its ferocity is as delicate as cat feet on a hardwood floor."
Gantenbein, the Seattle correspondent for The Economist and a columnist for Outside magazine, spent the 2001 fire season crisscrossing the West, learning all he could about fire. He talked to the experts in the national fire centers in Boise and Missoula, Mont., and to the hotshots on the fire lines, went through firefighter basic training and got his "red card," discussed the economics of firefighting with officials of the National Forest Service and the private contractors who are transforming firefighting, and saw more fires than he can remember...